Joyful Steward Student Planners Combo Set

My School Room

I wanted to add my photos of my school room again.  I had someone ask about it recently and thought I'd repost them.  (I lost my original blog when HSB did some updates).

We will be starting our 10th year  homeschooling and one very important part of this for me is making sure everything has a place.  There is nothing worse for me than trying to find something and it not being there.  That's not to say everything is always where it's suppose to be, not even close, but it's a nice goal, right?!

This set of shelves is where we store all our notebooking and scrapbooking supples.  I'm a big fan of the clear plastic draws.  I like these for several reasons, they are durable, afforable, clear and they can be pulled out and put back where they belong.  I perfer to have many small draws rather than a few big ones because things get lost on the bottom of them.  In the bottom three canvan baskets we have one with legos, one with blocks and one is actually empty at the moment.   I also label everything, this is because I don't want the kids to ever have an excuse to say "I didn't know where to put it".  I'd heard that way too often in the past, but no more!

I purchased the cubby book shelf at Target for about $50 and all the plastic draws bins at Wal-Mart for between $3-$10.  I use a tool caddy to home all the little scrapbook supplies and purchased that for about $10 at Wal-mart.

This is just a close up of on of the draw sets, it holds the 12 x 12 scrapbook paper.  We also make scrapbook pages for school, but that's another post.

This set of drawers holds the kids crayons, colored pencils and markers.  Again, I love being able to pull out the entire draw.  It's so easy and convenient.

This is Mom's set of draws for pencils, pens, highlighters, markers and labels.  The binders next to them are mine for each subject.  I divide each subject into 36 weeks and add any ideas, notebooking pages, worksheets, projects, etc. to the week where it would apply.  This has been a big time saver for me having everything I need in separate binders and in separate weeks.

This is my set of bookshelves.  I just have them sitting on a folding table.  I have used them for the last seven years and this has worked very nicely.

The set of bookshelves under the window hold the books I plan to use for the year.  One set holds literature, one set science and the last set history and geography.  The top shelf of all the book shelves are reference books for that subject.  The corner shelf holds my copy machine, paper, and misc. supplies.

This is our main desk area.  When we are working on something together we all sit around this table, which is again just 2 folding tables.  My youngest kids always sit by me, so they can have extra help.  We do A LOT of notebooking at this table.  We used to do our school devotional here, but have found sitting in the family room is much more comfortable.  Actually, we do most our reading and lessons in other rooms and only come in the school room to do our math, writing or anything that needs a desk.

You can see the kids desks lined up there to the right.  Each of the kids has there own desk where they can sit and do their independent work.

Each of the kids also has their own bookshelf.  This has been great to have.  It teaches them to govern their own things, keeps them organized and if they are messy the kids who share a nearby shelf gets on their case.  A little peer pressure is a good thing when it comes to this sort of thing.

The boxes on the bottom shelf hold our science project supplies for the school year.  Well, at least the ones that can be stored in a box.  Most science books will have a supply list at the beginning of the book with all the supplies you will need for each project throughout the year.

This world map was a school project a few years ago (this picture is a couple years old).  We put it on the wall with an overhead projector.  My kids traced on the lines with a pencil than went over it with a marker.  We paint in countries we have studied as we go.  When we decided to do this, we thought it would be good to paint the school room blue so we would have our oceans and other bodies of water already done.  I love having this map on the wall, it has been wonderful for the kids to have a visual and to see what they have learned over the years.  I'm sure I will treasure it even more once they are all gone.  The only thing I would do different is make it a bit smaller, it eats up an entire wall.  Wall space is kind of precious as many of you know.

Lapbooking

Trumpet of the Swan